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| Photo by Mark Lent |
| How do you anticipate a long jump? Easy. You don't. |
Sports photography: To me, it's always been the essence of photojournalism. Nothing set up, nothing preplanned. You just go out there and shoot it. Sports photography is one of those fields that you either love or hate, and you're either good at it or your not. There's no gray line.
Working at some newspapers, one of my biggest concerns was covering youth sports events. It's not that shooting little kids playing sports is a bad thing—it's dealing with the parents and people who run the leagues. I've had directors of Little League games tell me that I had to sit on the rooftop of a dugout, wearing a hard hat, because of “liability concerns.” Guess who didn't get any photos in the next day's paper? Some parents will stop you on the sideline of a football game and yell at you simply because their child wasn't featured in the previous game's write-up. My absolute favorite are those who stop you and ask, “What T.V. station do you work for?” I'll tell all of you, right here and now, that if you ever witness me acting like this at my kid's sporting events, you have my permission to shoot me on the spot.
I'll never forget the first "Big" sports event that I went to—a spring training game in Winter Haven, FL. That day, it was the Boston Red Sox and the Los Angeles Dodgers. I was 17-years-old and totally mesmerized by Tommy Lasorda, who, it turned out, was quite the entertainer that day—getting out of the dugout and talking to the crowd between innings. To me, it was what baseball should be: full contact with the crowd, casual and fun.
At that time, the Red Sox had an older guy who was pretty crusty around the edges shooting for them. He'd simply grunt when you asked him something, and one day he and I were the lone shooters on the first base side of the field. Wade Boggs was at the plate and I'd been instructed to get some nice shots of Boggs batting. First pitch...click Second pitch...click. Third pitch...click. The old guy turned at me and said, "Who the hell are you?" It caught me off guard to have someone ask me something like this in that kind of tone. I told him and readied myself to get kicked out of the park for doing something that I was sure I'd done wrong. "Well, you have GREAT timing...that ball was right where it should have been every time you shot. Good for you..." And with that, he turned around and didn't say another word to me for the rest of that game and all of spring training that year.
My timing was pretty good, and it got better with practice. Shooting sports well means that you can regularly anticipate what's going to happen. I practiced by shooting children playing. Along with being good feature photography for a paper, it helps to improve your timing—when kids run around, they tend to get pretty reckless, which makes it more difficult to get all of the elements of focus, exposure and timing correct. Learning to do this well will improve whatever you're shooting on the playing field.
Another way that I practiced was by shooting lightning during storms. Now, let me explain that you can shoot lightning by simply putting the camera on a tripod and opening the shutter for a long exposure. But that's not what I'm talking about. I mean shooting at 1/30 to 1/500 sec and handholding the camera. I got to the point a few years back that during one storm here in Tuscaloosa, I shot 10 frames of film and seven had bolts of lightning in the frame. It's not easy—lightning is fleeting and rarely lasts for more than half a second. How does this pay off? You learn to get the shots that others miss. It trains you to shoot proactively rather than reactively. Plus, the fun is in the challenge.
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